influence of a great writer amongst us, who has poured such unmeasured contempt on the Dryasdusts of this and a past generation, has created the belief that the unimaginative historian must also be an incompetent historian. So the demand for history-lively, attractive, and sparkling at all hazards—has produced the required supply. The temptation is great, and Mr. Green has not always been able to resist it. It was not in his nature to do so. For him, the animated, the poetical, and the picturesque exercise an irresistible fascination. He has a natural tendency to supply from his own fertile and fervid imagination the dramatic details that are wanting in his cold and colourless originals.

It is true that in this respect he does not stand alone. It is also true that from the days of Lord Macaulay historians have justified themselves by his example in the use of rhetorical exaggeration on the supposition that in no other way is it possible to represent to the dull and jaded perceptions of modern times the stirring incidents and emotions of the past. Mr. Green may think that he has sufficient warrant for following a precedent sanctioned by such eminent authority. We think otherwise. Not even in histories written for readers whose judgment and knowledge may be mature enough to prevent them from being misled, and whose skill may be sufficient to distinguish between truth and error, ought the baseless suggestions of the imagination to intrude upon the strict province of fact-of facts resting on unquestionable evidence. But in histories for the young-if Mr. Green's book be intended for the young-for the inexperienced and uninitiated, who are sure to take upon trust all that their teacher tells them, and are likely to be more impressed by the fictitious than the true, this licence is even less justifiable. Many readers of English history will never go beyond Mr. Green's book. They will place implicit confidence in a writer whose style and whose. genius they cannot fail to admire. Their conceptions of social progress, their judgment of past events, of the great personages that have moulded or modified our national destiny, will be determined exclusively by a perusal of Mr. Green's pages. In his case, therefore, strict accuracy is more important than in works which make no pretensions to speak with authority.

That such a caution is by no means unnecessary in this case may be inferred from the careless and indiscriminate applause lavished on the labours of Mr. Green by the journals and periodicals of the day. We will do him the credit to believe that no one is more conscious than himself of his own defects and imperfections. No one knows better than he the vastness of the task he has undertaken, and the impossibility, in the present

state

state of historical literature, of doing justice to all portions of the subject alike. On some it is clear he has bestowed greater care and attention than on others. If in some parts of his work we trace the conscientious study and examination of original authorities, in others he has trusted exclusively to secondary sources, attempting little more than a reproduction, after his own fashion, without exercising much independent judgment, and not always with rigid accuracy, of the opinions and conclusions of his predecessors. What else could he do? Mr. Green, we presume, has not yet attained to the age of Methuselah.

He has not the 'brazen entrails' or iron frame of the celebrated Greek Father, for he distinctly announces in his Preface that his work was written in hours of weakness and ill-health,' and he urges this as an apology for the faults and oversights,' of which he is only too conscious;' an apology which all who know anything of the immensity of his task will be ready enough to accept.

But such being the case, it is not easy to understand the extraordinary assertion of the leading journal of the day, that this history of Mr. Green will be found an able guide to every student of history through the latest as well as the earliest portions of the political and social life of England.' To those who have taken the trouble to examine the book with the slightest attention, such praise must appear extravagant and ridiculous. In the latest portions' of his history, Mr. Green has been satisfied with producing a meagre outline of the main facts of the time, bestowing very little attention on the political or social condition of the country. Whilst his history of England to the death of Queen Anne occupies 700 pages, the narrative from the House of Hanover to the year 1873, including the political complications under George III., the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the Peninsular War, the Battle of Waterloo-not to mention the religious reforms of the Wesleyans, the attempts of the Pretender in 1715 and 1745, the victories of Clive in India, the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the financial schemes of Pitt-is despatched in little more than a hundred pages.

To

the battles of the crows and kites,' as Milton stigmatises somewhat contemptuously the pre-Norman history of this country, Mr. Green has devoted more than twice the space he has allotted to the whole of the nineteenth century and the Victorian We do not quarrel with him for this want of proportion in his work; but it must be obvious how little historical criticism can be trusted when it can discern no difference in the study, thought,

era.

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thought, and treatment bestowed on the earlier, as compared with the later, portions of Mr. Green's labours.

The objects which Mr. Green proposed to himself are stated with tolerable precision in his Preface. It is a history,' as he informs us, not of English kings, or English conquests, but of the English people.'

At the risk of sacrificing much that was interesting'-the italics are our own-' and attractive in itself, and which the constant usage of our historians has made familiar to English readers, I have preferred to pass lightly and briefly over the details of foreign wars and diplomacies, the personal adventures of kings and nobles, the pomp of courts or the intrigues of favourites, and to dwell at length on the incidents of that constitutional, intellectual, and social advance in which we read the history of the nation itself. If I have said little of the glories of Cressy, it is because I have dwelt much upon the wrong and misery which prompted the verse of Longland and the preaching of Ball. But, on the other hand, I have never shrunk from telling at length the triumphs of peace. I have restored to their place among the achievements of Englishmen the "Faerie Queene" and the "Novum Organum." I have set Shakspere among the heroes of the Elizabethan age, and placed the scientific inquiries of the Royal Society side by side with the victories of the New Model. If some of the conventional figures of military and political history occupy in my pages less than the space usually given them, it is because I have had to find a place for figures little heeded in common history-the figures of the missionary, the poet, the painter, the merchant, and the philosopher.'

Well and good. We dispute no man's right to illustrate any phase that he pleases of English history. Nor do we stay to inquire what sort of mastery any student would acquire of so important a subject, who should know little or nothing of the actions of kings and nobles; should be wholly unacquainted with the foreign relations of this country, or the wars in which it had been engaged, or should attempt to disentangle-if disentangle he could-its internal from its external policy. Mr. Green regards war as mere butchery.' He thinks that it 'plays a small part in the real story of European nations, and in that of England its part is smaller than in any.' We ask, what this country would have been without war, morally as well as politically? We should be glad to learn how, without war, it would have obtained its colonies, its Indian Empire, its internal consolidation; without war, its national strength and unity; its proud and vigorous independence; its moderation, promptitude, courage, and endurance. To precedence among the nations it never could have made the slightest pretensions,

regarded

regarded in itself, in the extent of its natural territory, in its insulated and distant position. So far is Mr. Green's assertion from being correct, that there is no nation to whom war has been more beneficial, from first to last, than to England. There is no nation liable to lose more, to sink more rapidly into apathy, selfishness, and corruption, than England, when, satisfied with its own security and exclusiveness, it shuts itself up from the rest of Christendom. Unjust wars-wars for simple aggression -no one will uphold; and, fortunately, they have been rare in the history of this country. But war, in a righteous cause, war in defence of the just rights, whether of ourselves or of others; war for national and religious independence for resistance of arrogant pretensions—such war is not only justifiable, but the nation that steadily declines it must forfeit its claim to respect. So far as England is concerned, the most brilliant periods, not only of its political strength and development, but of its intellectual greatness and social progress, have followed in the train of war.

But allowing Mr. Green the full benefit of his own opinions on this subject, what are we to think of the judgment of his reviewers who so enthusiastically characterise his work as the one general history of the country, for the sake of which all others, if young and old be wise, will be speedily and surely set aside'? We have Mr. Green's own admission that he was not attempting a general history;' that he has passed lightly over details of foreign wars and diplomacies, of adventures hitherto regarded as important by the students of English history. No one can doubt, who has examined his pages, that he has not only passed lightly over them, but in some instances omitted them entirely. Mr. Green then, on his own showing, had no intention of writing a complete or general history of England. He was not contemplating the extinction or displacement of all previous manuals. He has composed a very lively and attractive, but very partial account of certain phases only of English history, of certain incidents which he considers are more important than others, more suited to his special purpose of illustrating the constitutional, intellectual, and social advance of the nation.' So far, then, from dispensing with plainer and less pretending manuals, Mr. Green's work has made the study of such manuals more indispensable than ever. If they were not necessary before, they have become absolutely necessary now, in order to guard Mr. Green's readers against certain errors into which he has been betrayed either by the liveliness of his temperament, or his overweening predilection for certain favourite political and religious theories. They are absolutely necessary

in

in order to supplement details neglected and omitted by Mr. Green, without which no history of England can be complete.

For though popular progress, and the advancement of the masses in intellectual and social development, as distinguished from the actions of kings and nobles, may be a very important part, it is not the whole of history, still less the whole of the history of this nation. The influence of kings and nobles, at all events until recent times, has been so marked and continuous, so intimately blended with every national effort, political, social, or intellectual, that their personal adventures,' as Mr. Green somewhat contemptuously styles them, cannot be disintegrated from the general body of our history without blurring its lineaments and mangling its due proportions. In no other country have all classes been more completely interfused; nowhere else have royalty and nobility been less confined to isolated and exclusive channels. Among no other people have kings and nobles stood so little aloof from the political and religious struggles and controversies of the times; or passed, as it were, from one camp to another, as deeply engaged, as profoundly interested in the great questions of the day as the people themselves. From Magna Charta to the last Reform Bill it is not the people alone, in the restricted sense applied to that word by Mr. Green, that have engaged in the fight for political, intellectual, or religious liberty. The battle on more than one occasion has been fought and won for the people by their kings and their nobles, when they themselves were careless or apathetic, engrossed only by their merchandise and their oxen. If kings and nobles had borne sosmall a part in popular progress, as Mr. Green seems to imagine, if they had been exclusively occupied with their own personal adventures' and 'personal interests,' considering the intense loyalty of Englishmen in general, their respect for aristocracy, and their love of law, this nation would have presented to the world a very different spectacle from that which it now presents. Constitutional and religious liberty, a firm and temperate government, combined with unrestricted individual freedom of thought and action, would have been as far off from us as they are from others we need not name.

But Mr. Green is not favourable to monarchy under any form. He cannot distinguish it from tyranny, or regard it in any other light than as an obstruction to popular progress and inimical to popular liberties. Monarchy and nobility are spuria vitulamina, they are a noxious parasitical vegetation destroying that which gives them nourishment. So for neither, for kings especially, has he a needless good word to throw away. He cannot regard with equanimity, much less with complacency, the conduct and cha

racter